A new way of selling Art

Hi all,

I hope every one know about firefox personas. We can design an addon, which shows the paintings or photographs as a browser wallpaper. So If people like the browser wallpapers(I mean paintings or photographs), they can buy it online, and user can also rank the paintings or photographs. I believe this would be a good platform for artists, so they can reach millions of people using our addon. We can enhance it to other domains, like fashion.

Thanks,
sathi.

Picture-Perfect

Problem: A problem I see around very often is people's need to get "great-looking" photos. It has become a fixation for most of us especially after the Facebook-profile-pic  craze. The question is "Can photos taken by amateurs be made great looking with little effort and no specific skill-set?". Imagine doing this editing in an iPhone/Android.

Current-Approaches: Many photo sharing apps on mobile phones(e.g: instagram) have a simple yet very useful feature called "filters" which apply predefined effects on images. They actually do a  good job and people simply love them.

Proposed Solution: Let us understand what is meant by a good photograph:

1> A very nice focus on 'main' object and blurring effect on the background=> Lens-Blur

2> apt-cropping of the image (or) neat framing.

3> Color-effects like in filters above.

4> Removal of unnecessary artefacts or noise. 

Some of these things can be done in a semi-supervised approach with some input from user and some of it done automatically.


Business-proposition:   You can give away a few effects for free and have a few paid features. With million of camera-enabled phones and with photos being a primary usage for them, you have a huge pool of buyers.

Global Hotkeys

Ever wondered how many key combinations our keyboards (assume a 101 key keyboard) have and what all we can do with those?

The answer to the first part of the question - I leave it to you guys to answer.
My answer to the second part - A LOT!

For the benefit of those who don't know what global hotkeys are, these are key combinations assigned to perform a task in an application. Just like Ctrl + Alt + Delete. Another example, I'm currently using the browser and I want to switch to the next track in my music player. A simple Ctrl + Alt + Right Arrow does it for me. It avoids the arduous task of going to the music player and switching to the next song and returning to the browser. Got the hang of it? Good.

If there's a way to assign custom keys to various tasks in various applications, wouldn't that be cool? Now add mouse input to this. Even cooler. Add touch to it. Add speech to it. Add any other input mechanism you can think of to it. Too complicated now? That's ok. You'll get used to it. You'll be amazingly productive on the computer thereafter.

AFAIK, there doesn't exist a tool through which you can assign shortcuts for tasks from various applications even for the keyboard. Such a tool would a super cool tool in my eyes.

PS: Quite an off-topic post probably? Just wanted to let people about global hotkeys if they haven't heard of them.

Server-Server #waiter

• Pain points
• To customer: You go to a restaurant and order something the first time. Then afterwards, for ordering the next item (which will typically be extra naans or some new thing). But calling the waiter: "hey bhaiyya"/"waiter" or some other thing is a problem. Even bigger problem is when you don't remember who your table's waiter is - and you want some spoon/onion or something.
• To customer: You don't know how each item looks in the menu. Typically you ask the waiter about specific items: "Bagara baigan mein gravy hota hai kya?" kind of questions. The pain here is that the number of questions you can ask the waiter is limited (you can imagine why) and you cannot see how every item looks like.
• Also, if there are some suggestions about what is special/quickly available/generally preferred item in a particular restaurant, it will be helpful to the customer and the restaurant owner will be happy to provide this data for the users.
• Idea
• What if all the menu cards/restaurant tables have QR code or some marker? When customers arrive at the restaurant table, they can point their smartphone cameras to the marker, which fires the menu up. The menu will be a standard card type menu, where items are clickable. 
• On clicking a particular menu item, you can see the image of how it looks like (solves the gravy problem), quantity information (veg biryani in different restaurants serves different number of people), etc.
• When you want to order another item from the middle of your meal, you order it from the app itself (you give the quantity and item), you know the running price (track to see if it is in your budget), you get suggestions about what is popular in this restaurant, etc. Basically, computer server becomes the hotel server here...
• What more? The order you give fires up a timer, if you do not get service within a time, you can rate the restaurant directly from there (think improved service).
• Once we get all the rating/orders/popular-items-in-a-restaurant, etc. we can provide analytics about it to the restaurant owner about what items are going well, what needs to be improved, how is the service at each table, etc.
• Since we know all the analytics, we can provide discounts to repeated customers (configurable by the restaurant owner).
• Technology challenges/description
• The augmentation part is easy.
• Analyzing the data and giving useful feedback to restaurant owners is a big data/text mining challenge.
• Marketing this app to users and restaurants.
• Competitors
• Yelp/OpenTable (not direct competition though), FourSquare (in the discounts category).
• Market 
• All restaurants which expect customers who have smartphones with cameras.
• Business model 
• The app can be free both to restaurant owners and customers but the data of which item is being ordered by whom, and how many times (data analytics/market research, basically) can be sold to other companies or even restaurant owners themselves.

NetFlix for Youtube Videos #SponsoredContent

• Pain points: 
• For creators: 
• Video content publishers in youtube (think amateur short film makers) have no business model for the awesome entertainment content they deliver (sometimes short films are actually better than the mainstream ones but still we pay only for the flop movie content in theaters but not for youtube videos). #ad-based-revenue-for-content.
• Want analytics and expert feedback on their content. Analytics are currently provided by Youtube but expert feedback is in the comments - can this be improved?
• They need publicity for videos. The whole point of putting a video on Youtube is for showing off/publicity. #Can we improve it?
• For video content hosts: Youtube, despite being the thing which many users can't live without, doesn't have a good business model. #business model for youtube.
• For users: Don't want to pay for youtube which has been free all the while.
• Idea (needs improvement - please help):
• Design a ad structure for video sharing sites like youtube and facebook - I am not saying the ads will be non-intrusive at all (which is bad for advertisers). They will be as intrusive as TV ads (to which users are used to anyway), or may be as much as display ads.
• Like all passive ads (like TV ads or display ads in internet), the ads will be embedded in content. The embedding can be done in several ways (needs improvement/your feedback)
• Ads can be augmented in the video. Ex: Zuna vision, Stanford.
• Starting of the video like already existing youtube ads.
• In between the video - based on video content. If it is cricket match/MTV video, ads (different ads each time) can be present in between overs/songs.
• So, in summary, it will be a website/app which provides some tools for content creators/video makers to edit videos - augment their videos with some virtual objects, put images as background to some parts of videos (called video compositing - the one you see as background to hosts in tv9's weather report), etc. But, while editing the videos, the creator will show some space where we can put some ads. During his editing time, we can show him other videos as suggestions which will improve content discovery (needs improvement).
• Technology challenges/description
• Embedding ads in video
• Content discovery - think of videos (with our ads) appearing as suggestions in the right side top panel of Facebook.
• Competitors
• None I know of do both easy content discovery (which is marketing for video makers - we publicize your video by making it discoverable) and embedded ads in video.
• Market (possible customers)
• Youtube and facebook videos have a new business models. And, since content (along with the ads, of course) is shown in the ad space, the CTRs are bound to be higher than the traditional sponsored search ads.
• Business model
• Advertiser pays every time his video ad is shown to a user. We can distribute that revenue between our platform and the original video content owner (can be figured easily - challenge level is low here).
• Or even niche clients like national geographic/ndtv/espn can monetize their old videos using ads in plain spaces (charcha vedikas ante table space of the news reader/discussion forum is generally plain and available for ads/ ground for sports is free for ads, etc) is huge money.

One button/touch emergency phone call/message

Not something that people wouldn't have thought of I'm sure.

An SOS phone application (if this ever gets made, I'm planning to call it "Save Your Phooks") which must be capable of the following:

1. If you've met with any kind of accident, based on the GPS data about the current location, it should inform the nearest hospital/ambulance services, police, family, etc.
2. If you're in a difficult situation (being kidnapped, mugged etc.), based on a few patterns of phone movements (rotate the phone 360 degrees, throw it down or some such thing), automatically message the police etc.. Such a thing could be a boon for women especially.
3. And of course, signal SOS (how many of us really know how to signal SOS?) using the phone camera's flash.

Will add to this when I think of some more.

Wireless adhoc network for all mobiles, desktops, Laptops, TVs etc

Pain-Point:
I really hate to transfer my media files (music, pictures, videos, docs) across multiple devices. What if I can access these files from any device even though they are stored on only one of the devices. E.g: I might have all my songs on my desktop and I would like to stream them and listen to them on my mobile especially when in proximity. I might want to see/stream and listen to songs from a friend's mobile or desktop.

Technology-Challenge:
You need to leverage any possible connection channels: Wifi, blue-tooth to build a connection. Some of you might argue that this is possible through ssh or scp. The common end-user cannot use them. So, this technology must be seamless and extremely easy to use. It must be something like ad-hoc network between various devices as they move. We could also use GPS for location.

Similar-products and Related Reading
1> Color: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/color-labs
This start-up does photo sharing based on proximity using GPS and bluetooth.

2> Yobongo: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/yobongo
They do proximity based chat-rooms

3> SubSonic: http://lifehacker.com/#!5505345/subsonic-streams-your-desktop-music-to-iphones-and-android
Streams music from desktops to iPhones and Androids.

4> Dropbox: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/dropbox
Simple file syncing across devices: something like rsync(linux) for end-users.

5> Bumpp: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/bump-technologies
Physically bump your phones to sync contacts, share music and pictures. Uses GPS, blue-tooth and accelerometers.

The 'big' idea is that if we can build a reliable and seamless technology, we can build a useful service around the technology. Some of the above ones are examples of the services that are already present.  Even if a service is present, it is alright because very often they are not very easy to use and not seamless. E.g: I tried to use Subsonic for music streaming. It needs me to setup a desktop server like system to do it. The ubuntu tool they gave just does not work and most importantly, I want a seamless and simple to use system with no complex to-dos. Check dropbox for how simple it makes file syncing here: http://www.dropbox.com/

Usage

This is a blog where we want to phook-storm all the ideas which can make us phookerbergs in the future. This is a place to put all your innovation in generating ideas and also discuss/improve the feasibility of various ideas via comments for each idea. So, each phook is expected to do the following:

- Think about a new idea

- Put that into a new blog post

- Discuss/improve it in the comments section of that post - Posts are expected to be critical (read damn frank) and constructive.

- Form your team from the guys who commented, etc.

- Implement that shit and become a phookerberg...

Guidelines:

Each idea is expected to be simple and easy to understand. It can be roughly divided into the following sections (you can probably copy this and use it as a template if you like it). Italicized sections are optional:

• Idea (high level description of what is gonna be done)
• Pain points (customer's problem that you are addressing)
• Technology challenges/description
• Competitors
• Market (possible customers)
• Business model (if any)